by Wiley Cash
They sang a few songs that everyone knew, and then Ella sang “Two Little Strikers” and “All Around the Jailhouse,” both of which she’d written after Aderholt had been killed and the strikers arrested in June. She’d sing a line and the rest of the people in the truck would repeat it, and they carried on that way while they grew closer to Gastonia. The day warmed as the sun climbed higher. Ella shrugged off John’s old coat and put her hands in the pockets of her dress to hide her belly.
The caravan crossed the bridge into Gastonia. Ella felt the truck slow and come to a stop. They waited.
“What’s going on?” Ella asked. “Why we stopping?”
One of the men in her group climbed the slats on the side of the truck and peered over and saw that the other truck had stopped as well. The engine still ran, vibrating the floor and sending tremors through Ella’s body. She heard voices, then shouts.
The truck jolted backward, and Ella stumbled. She would have been tossed over the tailgate had Violet not grabbed hold of her arm. The truck reversed itself, driving backward across the bridge slowly as if the driver were uncertain of what was happening up ahead.
“Other truck’s backing up too,” the man who’d remained posted atop the slats said. “Looks like we’re turning around.”
“We shouldn’t be turning around,” Ella said. “Ain’t no reason to turn around.”
But once they’d crossed the bridge and parked on the shoulder, with the other truck having passed them en route back to Bessemer City and the driver of Ella’s truck having turned back toward home too, she was able to see what had caused them to stop. On the other side of the bridge, a cluster of parked automobiles blocked the road. Dozens of men stood holding rifles. She narrowed her eyes and did her best to recognize their faces; she thought she may have recognized a few.
“Damn,” Ella said. She slapped the tailgate as hard as she could, hard enough to hurt her had she taken notice. “Damn, damn, damn.” She wanted to jump out, run around to the front of the truck, flag the driver down, and tell him to turn around. They’d find another way into the city.
The truck rounded a bend, and she could no longer see the roadblock that was now a mile or so behind her. She turned to Violet.
“We can’t go back to Bessemer,” Ella said. Terror had gripped Violet’s eyes. She nodded, and Ella knew without her admitting it that Violet did not agree.
Ella pushed her way toward the front of the truck bed. She’d bang her fist on the roof of the cab, order the driver to stop, ask him what the men at the roadblock had said, and sort through their options. She’d made it halfway to the front when there was the sound of a car speeding past, followed by the force of its passing as it rocked the truck on its axles. A woman beside Ella screamed and grabbed on to Ella as if she feared falling. The next sound Ella heard was the crunch of metal hitting metal.
“They’re running them off the road!” a man called out, but Ella could not see to whom the voice belonged, did not know who they or them were. The people surrounding her broke into a panic, and when she looked for Violet she saw another black car behind them just before it struck the rear of their truck, slamming them into the truck in front of them.
At first Ella thought it was the violence of the accident that caused her to stumble and lose her balance, but when she saw the sky give way to trees and then earth she understood that the truck had been overturned, and she found herself caught in a web of arms and legs and bodies, all of them screaming and trying desperately to untangle from one another. She struggled to free herself, calling Violet’s name over and over but getting no response.
She’d gotten to her feet by the time the first gunshots rang out, and she knew that what she heard were not backfires from an engine. None of the strikers had brought weapons, and she could not understand why someone would be shooting at them. But the sound of the blasts scattered the people who’d toppled from the overturned truck, and they ran past Ella. When she looked toward the other truck in their caravan she saw strikers streaming over the sides and pouring from the tailgate. Before she knew it she’d crossed the road and was stumbling down a hill toward a shallow stream. More gunshots rang out.
She didn’t know why she was running. She was certain that some kind of mistake had been made, that some confusion had spun events into motion and would eventually unwind them. Her shoes splashed through the stream, the hem of her dress snagging for a moment on a fallen branch.
Sprays of blue and purple wildflowers grew along the water, and as she ran past them Ella marked their beauty, thinking what a strange thing it was for her to notice them in such detail at this moment. She did not know who ran in front of her or beside her or behind her, but she was aware that the dirt had blackened and hardened, and she discovered that she ran through the first rows of a cotton field, the bolls exploding in white puffs all around her. There were more gunshots behind her, and she wanted to drop to her knees and take shelter, but the field was open and the cotton plants low, and there was nowhere else to go.
So when she heard someone call her name from the road behind her, she knew for certain that she was being invited back to the scene of the accident. She knew that something would be explained to her that would make clear that a mistake had been made. She heard her name again. She stopped running, turned, and held a hand to her eyes to block the sunlight. That’s when she saw the glint of steel, followed by a shot that tore into her chest and knocked her back into the cotton.
It was quiet now. The sky above her was blue, with soft spreads of clouds. The sun was warm on her face, the earth cool against her back. She wanted to sigh, but she found that her lungs would not let her take a breath, so instead she closed her eyes and opened them slowly, turned her gaze to the rows of cotton she lay between. She didn’t realize how brisk the day had been until she watched the breeze move through the cotton, turning it this way and that, her eyes taking in the bright white bolls where they clung to the branches. She felt her heart slow, something warm and comfortable overtake her. She wanted to reach up and touch one of the bolls, to feel its softness against her fingers, perhaps hold it to her cheek, but she found that she could not lift her arms. Instead, she spread her fingers so that they opened across her belly, the roundness of which she was just barely able to register. She lay with her eyes fixed on the cotton, pondering the tiny life inside her that she would never meet.
Look at that cotton, baby, she thought. What a small thing. What a small, little thing.
Chapter Sixteen
Brother
Saturday, September 14, 1929
The streets around Loray were choked with police, no sign of strikers or a picket line or the outside agitators the newspaper had warned of. Brother drove the abbey’s Model T truck along Franklin Avenue, Father Gregory’s rifle resting on his lap, the box of shells on the seat beside him. He’d sat inside the confessional until he was certain the woman had gone, and then he’d fled out the front doors into the sunlight. In the orchard across the street, he’d seen Father Gregory on his hands and knees gathering apples into a basket. He’d found the keys to the automobile on the hook in the kitchen where they always hung.
He pulled to the corner across from Loray. A policeman stood speaking with men in suits. They looked like reporters. Brother opened his door and called to the policeman.
“Where’s the rally?” he asked.
The policeman frowned and stepped off the curb toward the truck. “Why?” he asked. “You from out of town?”
“No,” Brother said. “I work with the monks at the abbey.”
“Oh,” the policeman said. “I’m sorry, I just thought.” He looked north, down the street in the direction of where the strikers’ headquarters had sat just weeks earlier. “We shut it down. No protests today.”
“What about the Bessemer City group?”
“They stopped them at the bridge.”
“Who’s they?” Brother asked.
“I don’t know,” the policeman said. He smiled.
“Just they.”
He headed west out of Gastonia for the open highway that led to Bessemer City. As soon as he crossed the bridge he saw dozens of cars and trucks parked on the side of the road. A truck had tipped over and come to rest on its side in the field below. Men stood along the road and stared down at the truck. Most of the men were armed. In the field, black and white strikers sat bloodied and shaken. A few of them dared to walk back toward the road, the bravest of them screamed taunts at the armed men.
Brother parked the truck and took up the rifle, chambered a round, and stuffed more into his pockets. He felt and heard the ammunition clink against the Mason jar, and he pulled the jar loose and tossed it onto the floorboard. He climbed out of the truck and shimmied down the bank toward the field, where people stood in groups, some attending others who appeared injured. He searched each face for Ella’s, but he did not see her. He reached a creek that cut through the field. He stumbled, and fell on the mossy rocks. The rifle slipped from his hands, and he got to his knees and felt around in the water until his fingers found it. He stood, then raced toward the high cotton on the other side of the creek.
He found her lying in the dirt between rows of cotton, the front of her dress soaked in blood. Her open eyes stared toward the sky. Brother knelt beside her, searched her throat for a pulse, placed his ear against her chest in the hope of hearing a heartbeat or feeling her lungs expand with breath. He stayed there, his head to her chest, the tiny chair coming to rest upright above her heart. Brother watched the chair, waiting for it to be disturbed by anything but the wind, but it did not move. He sat up, looked down at Ella’s face, tried to picture her as the girl he’d met all those years ago in Cowpens, the girl who’d swindled him for pork rinds and Coca-Cola to satisfy Miss Myra’s curiosity about the young woman in the wagon with the newborn baby.
Now, sitting by Ella’s body in a cotton field miles away from the place he’d first seen her outside the general store, he recalled Miss Myra’s questions to him where she’d stood in the doorway to the bedroom of John Wiggins’s dogtrot. “Oh, Verchel, what are we going to do with them? With you?”
While he did not have an answer then, he had one now. He knew what he had done with himself, what all of his drunken hours with John Wiggins back in Cowpens had done to Ella and her children once Miss Myra had discovered how he spent his afternoons. The family had been forced out of town in the middle of the night. Miss Myra had forced him out as well. All he had wanted was to marry a good woman and be a good man, and he had tried, but he had failed. Seeing Ella again after all these years had given him another chance, and he’d failed at that as well. He slipped the necklace over his head and removed the tiny chair from the leather strap. He tucked it into Ella’s pocket.
He heard the rustling of footsteps. A young colored woman appeared in the next row, her chest heaving from running. She looked at him for a moment, and then she looked down at Ella’s body, covered her mouth with both hands, and screamed.
Chapter Seventeen
Lilly Wiggins
Monday, December 26, 2005
I begged her not to go, Edwin. I was so young, and it was so long ago that it seems like I shouldn’t remember, but I do. I can remember feeling like it was all over after the policeman had been killed and so many of them had been arrested. I just remember thinking that it was unnecessary for her to go because it had all ended.
We were standing out there in the road, watching the people load up into these big trucks. Well, they seemed like big trucks at the time. I remember telling Mother, “I don’t want you to go.” And she said, “Well, I have to, and I will.” And she did. If someone had come along at that moment and told me that I’d never see my mother again, I think I would have believed them. I’ve always believed that so much about my life was decided right at that moment.
Mother sent me home, Iva and me both. Iva was sore because she thought it was my fault that she didn’t get to go with them. But I didn’t care what she was sore about. I was too afraid.
Iva had gone home to her house, so, an hour or so later, when I saw her coming down the road screaming as loud as she could, I knew something had gone wrong. She was screaming, “Hey, Lilly! Hey, Lilly!” and I remember standing on the front porch and wondering what she was going to tell me once she arrived. But as she got closer I was able to hear her more clearly. She’d been screaming, “They killed her. They killed her.” And of course I knew exactly who they’d killed.
The two trucks in which she rode were attacked by an armed mob. Dozens of people witnessed it, but no one claimed to know for certain who had shot her. The police ended up arresting a few men, but Loray bailed them out and paid for their legal defense. They were all found innocent. I doubt it surprised anyone. It didn’t surprise me.
The day after her funeral, the preacher who’d been hired by someone in town to preach her service came to pay us a visit. Mother hadn’t stepped foot in a church in years, and I suspect they were afraid that someone from the union would want to lead the service. They’d all had enough of the union by then, so someone paid the Presbyterian preacher to do it.
The preacher wasn’t done with us yet. He showed up with his wife, and they made us pack up the few things we owned and told us we were going on a trip. What they didn’t say was that we were going to Barium Springs, the Presbyterian children’s home outside Statesville. And what they definitely didn’t tell us was that the preacher’s wife had planned on keeping Wink. We didn’t know that until they dropped us off that evening. It was like another death, Edwin. We didn’t see him for years and years, and by the time I finally found him he had no memory of me or Mother or Rose or your father. He was a stranger by then, and I was a stranger to him.
The orphanage was nice, and we should have appreciated it more than we did because we had no other option. For the first time in our lives we had everything we’d ever wanted— school, clothes, shoes, food—but we’d lost something of ourselves. We were used to living outside, used to coming and going whenever we pleased. We’d never had anyone “in charge” of us, and it took us a long, long time to get used to it.
At night, after all the girls in my room had fallen asleep, I’d sneak outside through a window and climb down the gutter and drop to the ground in my bare feet. I’d wander around out there until near sunrise, and then I’d sneak back inside. That was the only time I felt like I was back home in Stumptown, the woods alive with night sounds right outside my window, the spring babbling like a voice not far away.
I got braver and braver, wandered farther and farther away from the home, stayed gone longer than I should have. Sometimes I’d be sweating and out of breath when the time came to get out of bed in the morning. Oh, I thought I was slick, thought I was getting something over on all the other girls and my teachers too.
I was never scared to be out there alone at night, until I heard the cry for the first time. It sounded like the scream of a woman who feared for her life, and I hate to use a cliché, Edwin, but it made my blood run cold. I thought for certain that some poor girl was out there in the woods being murdered. I would not hear it for a few nights, and then I would hear it every night for a week.
You may already know what it was, Edwin, especially because we heard it tonight when we were standing outside your house. It was the roar of a panther, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know what it was, not until the home’s new pastor told me.
He was an old man, and I can’t remember his name. I was drawn to him because he sounded “mountain” when he spoke the same way Mother sounded “mountain” when she spoke. He was from Cullowhee, and when I found it on a map I saw that it was close to Bryson City, and I knew Mother had spent time there as a little girl.
I never told the pastor that I snuck out at night. I’ve never told a soul except for you, so I hope you can keep my secret. I did tell the old pastor about the screams I heard at night that came from the woods behind the home, how I’d hear them every night for a while and then go
weeks without hearing a thing at all. I asked him what he thought it could be.
He told me a story about growing up in the mountains, about how his grandfather would take him bear hunting at night, and sometimes they’d hear the scream of a panther up in the hills, and his grandfather would say, “That’s the sound of a heartbroken woman calling for her lost babies to come home.”
I asked him if it could really be a panther that I’d been hearing, but he told me he didn’t think so. He told me they lived up in the mountains and that there were fewer and fewer of them now, and perhaps soon there wouldn’t be any at all. But then he stopped, and thought about it for a second. He said, “Well, with all the logging and the waste and the mudslides, I reckon we could’ve forced her down the mountain to visit us all the way out here.”
I’ve hung on to that after all these years, this idea that the lumber companies forced the panther from the mountains just as they forced Mother into that wagon bound for Cowpens. I’ve hung on to the idea that the sound of that woman calling her lost babies home was the sound of Mother looking for us. After that, when I heard it at night out in the woods, I’d close my eyes and chant over and over, “I am alone, and you are alone. I am alone, and you are alone.” I know it’s silly, but I still feel that way, and I found myself saying the same thing over and over on the drive home tonight after hearing that panther’s cry from down at the zoo.
But here’s what I wanted to tell you, Edwin. This is the reason I wrote you this letter tonight.
We’d been at the home for three years or so when that old pastor came to my class one day and told me that I had a visitor. I was fourteen years old, and I’d never had a visitor before. Not a single one. All of the things of my life were housed in those buildings there at Barium Springs. It felt as if the world outside were a place that no longer existed. I had no ties to it, so the idea of the world coming to visit me was exhilarating.